Do not download the app, use the website

A lot of native apps are just wrappers around a JS context with a few bridges into native APIs and they are pure data grabs.

Reddit always asks you to use its native app, for example. Why the fuck would I care so much about Reddit that I want it outside of my browser? Same goes for any other website.

Most apps, these days, seem to be “hybrid,” where they use a system like Ionic or React. These systems usually slap on some considerable libraries.

I understand why, but I’m not a fan of hybrid apps. I like to do native, which results in much smaller, faster, and more efficient apps. It’s just not as cost-effective, if you want to support multiple platforms.

However, native apps aren’t automatically well-behaved ones. In fact, they usually have access to even more tools for eroding privacy or user agency.

Good behavior is up to the app developers, and that doesn’t seem to be much of a priority, these days.

Funny cause I was just thinking about the tradeoff of "internal wasm app" vs "internal native app".

The former has convenient distribution, but worse performance and other limitations.

The latter can be tricky to keep updated, ensure the environment is the same for everyone and/or cross-platform differences, etc., but significantly better/faster.

But both binaries about the same size. Assuming using something like sokol or SDL3.

500MB average seems like a gross exaggeration. I agree apps are oversize but I have maybe 2 native apps on mobile that are so large.

    wechat:          740meg
    gmail:           672
    google chat:     585
    uber:            582
    tiktok:          572
    headspace:       498
    instagram:       467
    doulingo:        462
    bank of america: 456
    capital one:     435
    expedia:         412
    linkedin:        402
    doordash:        392
    google:          379
    facebook:        365
    unitied airlines:355
    chase:           352
    google photos:   348
    line:            346
    amex:            339
    google maps:     336
    youtube:         329
    booking.com:     320
    citi:            319
    amazon music:    317
    snapchat:        316
    lyft:            307
    wells fargo:     292
    strava:          283
    twitch:          279
    rotten tomatoes: 262
    airbnb:          254
    youtube music:   245
    whatsapp:        239
    mlb:             220
    discord:         212
    tinder:          202

   Gmail: 612mb
   Facebook: 359mb
   YouTube: 303mb
   Amex: 365mb

The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research something or the post box clearing out if you switch focus, the comment box being nearly impossible to navigate through with the cursor, these are all profoundly egregious bugs that have been there for years.

Basically if you intend it to do something more substantive than comment a series of emojis, they have a bunch of bugs that block you.

I'm guessing someone has made the calculation that being terrible in these ways are more profitable.

Maybe people doom scroll more if the content is vapid?

I'd love to see the user stories. "Brenda is a 52 year old professional who likes commenting "Happy Birthday" to AI generated images of people with cakes. She loves multilevel marketing and buying stuff on Temu. Her husband Greg, reposts memes programmatically generated by content farms using LLMs and topic trackers"

Also uhh the default search engine in mobile Safari. Just Google searching gives you a half-page notice to install the app. If you have the app, it's a half-page notice to use the app. And guess what's inside the app, a website.

I believe that's done based on user-agent header; but it shouldn't be surprising that the UA on a mobile browser is the hardest to change, showing once again that users' control of their computing devices is extremely important. With the appropriate UA, imgur will just give you the raw image data directly.

The worst for me is when you open Google Maps in the browser and the appears with the blue continue button. If you click it, it opens the iOS store page. If you then move back to your browser it re-opens and focuses the iOS store page one more time.

I hate Imgur. Even with the app installed I find it doesn’t work well. I don’t understand why people use it — does it just work for them in a way it doesn’t for me, or are they more tolerant of its terrible usability?

I hate imgur with their freaking redirects of deep links that have .jpg or .png in their URLs. They redirect to the HTML and then ask me to download a shitty app and prevent me from looking at the damn content.

If you cannot afford the web traffic, just shut down your webservers instead of this bullshit.

Just don't collect any data. Having an app doesn't mean you need to collect any data.

>app icons are just "advertisement"

You wouldn't believe the volume of actual advertisements that show up as push notifications on my wife's phone

I also hate obligatory mobile apps, especially when they’re linked to hardware: At the battery company I work for - pilaenergy - we’re aware that our hardware may well outlive our software, so we’re providing a mobile app that’s accessible over an WiFi access point or over your local WiFi, as well as the traditional mobile apps. This way - the software comes bundled with the hardware and can’t be sunset. Something that has long been an issue with IoT products.

The author is not contesting that the app experience is better. Yeah, the web experience is worse -- because the product people are treating the entire web presence as a _marketing surface_ for the app. So, the web version is basically an ad for the app. This is true of Reddit, Yelp, and others. How could it not be worse?

It's too bad because it's not like the web is incapable of providing a beautiful ux for those products. But then so why do you think these companies employ massive teams of devs, for Android, and then again for iOS, reimplementing their functionality on every platform? All that to provide you with that sweet extra smooth native "feel", 2% nicer than the web could do? No, it's not for you...

Mobile apps are so limited compared to an actual web browser's interface. The reddit mobile app only lets you view one topic/conversation at a time. Same with the IMDB app; it's impossible to do any research, like comparing actors or movies, using the IMDB mobile app because the flows are all captive and there's very limited ways to navigate between the resources. With a browser, I can open up multiple sets of content at once. So many mobile apps are just fixed views and offer no compelling interface for anything but the extremely limited way they want (force) you to use their app. The fact that a browser allows multiple tabs and can do bookmarking makes up for (works around) the relatively lack luster interfaces both website and mobile apps have.

The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web.

Apps break often. They need a lot of support. Everything must be constantly updated. You never know when Samsung or Apple will push an update that breaks things because of some esoteric policy shift or setting change.

But the web? If you do it right, maintenence is much easier. If things do break: users can try different browsers or devices to get around instead of being bricked.

I can't be the only one who _never _ updates software on my phone until I absolutely have to. Everything is so brittle. I'm sick of being gaslit that apps make that better. Despite it's own horrible implementations, the web is far more stable.

Tbh, the web won the application platform mostly because it's a standard. Everybody knows html, css and a little JS.

On the other hand, for mobile apps, there is still a device-specific mentality.

Imagine web apps being built with a different flavor for all the major browsers...

I hope that the same level of standardization comes to mobile apps too with the option to use more device-specific features on top of the generic UI.

>The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version, in my opinion. Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique.

I want native programs on my PC, and fewer apps on my phone.

I get all my apps from F-Droid. If I need to use Steam chat or view the menu at Taco Bell, mobile website it is. I am not gonna put their proprietary software on my phone. This also brings up another interesting difference. There is no desktop program for Taco Bell, that would be super weird. I think other comments already addressed that, but a lot of mobile apps are basically just the website.

A game like Luanti or some sort of Tetris is something I'd want native in both places (desktop and mobile). Games in browsers are a mess.

With exception to Reddit, I generally prefer apps to sites because mobile process management is considerably nicer than browser tab management.

App processes are sorted in order of most recent use, keeping the most relevant ones at hand, and those that aren’t used for a while just silently go away without much fuss.

In comparison browser tabs aren’t organized unless the user does that themselves, and so with each web app tab management overhead increases. Some browsers have an idle tab auto-close feature, but that closes the wrong tab (usually a page with info pertinent to something I’m working on) quite often. “Installing” PWAs can be an ok-ish workaround, but the problem there is that a lot of sites don’t have the little bit of manifest magic that makes saving to home screen “install” a PWA instead of just opening a browser tab.

> The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version

I've found it to be the opposite. Perhaps if you're heavily involved on Reddit, LinkedIn, etc., then it's more convenient. But I only go to those sites via a search link. Why would I want to spend time and effort installing the app, just to see the same content I just landed on?

It's a huge red flag when websites push their app so intrusively. It means the app has little value and will be just as bad or worse when you use it.

That's partially by design. Apple makes it a pain to make proper PWA's, and companies with websites make extremely intrusive elements to ruin the mobile website in order drive to the app. Which is easier to monetize and harder to adblock, I imagine. Some places outright disable the mobile view for the app.

More simply, I don't need an app for every website I visit. a bookmark is much more lightweight than downloading yet another app to clutter my drawer.

People who know what Electron is and profess hatred for it are usually mostly annoyed by the fact that it bundles all of Chrome, giving the app an absurd memory and storage footprint relative to its functionality. People don't complain the same way when apps are made with Tauri.

For me, the last straw with the Amazon app was when it started injecting ads into the Android text selection UI

Isn't the mobile app of Reddit just using electron as well?

Many of the “native” apps on mobile app stores are React Native, though.

If this was actually done, let's say as a government-imposed requirement, we may actually see some innovation in browser usage and the release of new UI frameworks.

Honestly haven't noticed this. What I have noticed is that few if any apps implement a "find text on this page" which I use constantly in browser.

it doesn't seem like you even read the relatively short post since:

"The native app experience for every app noted in the article" doesn't make any sense, the article lists none.

"Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique."

again......what does this have to do with the article at all? Aren't you merely reinforcing the articles point?

" Just reject it, there’s nothing that says you have to accept on either platform, so to say that’s a negative for native apps is odd."

Except that most app's would stop working if anyone confined them to the minimum amount of data required, case in point any scooter app that won't let you rent unless you have google location services turned on vs just regular GPS.

OPs point is that app are a walled garden of functionality that lock users in because of expedience for living life.

I agree with you: I always use native apps where they exist, on mobile or desktop and only use web apps if I’m forced too.

I have never liked notifications on iOS so I can't say for sure but I do know that on Android it's been possible to disable certain types of notifications or demote the urgency for at least 5 years now.

Whether or not most people are aware of this ability is another question, I guess.

On Android/Graphene, I recommend permanently turning on do not disturb and adding apps to the allowlist. Opt in to notifications, rather than opting out.

You can get push notifications to your phone from a website through the browser, even when that website isn't still open.

But presumably developers have more control over app notification look & feel vs browser notifications?

> Idc about privacy

Until you do. Then it is too late

99% of apps don't need any native feature.

Google is a lot better in this regard though, but supporting most things on Safari are an absolute PITA

True, but it does force citizens into a contract with either Apple or Google. I don’t think that is a good idea both from the perspective of individual freedom and national sovereignty.

The DigiID app could interact with websites, that's how it works for many other digital IDs in europe.

For example with bankID (sweden, and I think the norway version does the same) when you need to authenticate you either scan a QR code with the bankID app or select "on the same device" and then the website will interact with the bankID API to auth.

Either way you don't need your own app to get proper auth working with this sort of government login.

(With bankID the app devs still pay a per-auth price, but that is not due to any technical reason, just because its made by a profit-driven semi-monopoly)

In this case there is also a perceivable benefit for the user. SMS 2FA is vulnerable to sim swapping, this is not possible when TOTPs are delivered in-app. The app is also FOSS [1], so even if you're paranoid you can still inspect what data is sent.

There are also just some things you cannot realistically do in the browser (or over SMS) without having to ship specialised hardware to 18 million people, like reading the NFC chip of your passport. This is needed for DigiD Substantieel and Hoog, which are mandated by the eIDAS regulations.

[1] https://github.com/MinBZK/woo-besluit-broncode-digid-app/

This could have just been TOTP.

Another advantage to using the Discord website is that it's easier to style/modify using extensions such as tampermonkey.

I agree, I always use Discord web over the Electron app. Beyond what you said, using it in the browser also has better backward/forward behaviour and it's easier to handle media and links. Also, being inspectable is quite nice.

I also lose the ability to keep my place in my browser when I switch to it.

(Yes, in theory, I could open another browser window for it instead of another tab. In practice, Chromium will pick the wrong window to remember the tabs from when it’s restarted, so I try to stick to one window.)

Is that how it works? Don't you need to call into it with the Social SDK?

I use the web app on my phone as well, and it's... usable. The mobile app is quite slow, probably because React Native apps are far from being native, so in that regard the experience is the same. Being able to block all enshittified features is quite nice.

>needs location

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...

Even Signal asks for Contacts. Whatsapp asks every other time you open the app.

I can't use Zelle on my bank's web page any more, they just redirect to their app which is literally just their website in an app.

All of those shortcomings were deliberately orchestrated by Google and Apple to keep taxing developers.

> if your app's entire functionality could be done in a regular website or PWA, then you can't put a native app on our stores

A very silly threshold, since this would knock out probably 95% of the app store, including games, since "websites" are extremely capable these days, with full 3d graphics, etc. Then, each time safari added a new modern browser feature, more would get knocked out.

Given how much it seems Apple detests PWAs, I don't ever see this happening. One can dream.

then they can't charge their app tax!

What you probably envision but didn’t say is that this would be in a world where a website could be a first class citizen and behave more like an app. Mobile browsers don’t have e to be so shitty.

You forgot data collection

I think if people realized how much data they can get from your iPhone with simple permissions like WiFi they’d think twice about giving so many apps access

And why does a developer care about those things if not for the fact it means they can collect data even when the user isn’t actively using the service?

I actually do not want your garbage persisting on my machine and if you want to notify me you can ask for my email and maintain the required infrastructure to send me notification emails.

That's not Android, that's whatever software you're using. I think I've noticed this in previous versions of Firefox mobile before, but not as much recently. And essentially never in Lightning browser. Where are you seeing this?

just for those who don't know:

https://old.reddit.com/

You should! The browser APIs are straightforward:

  navigator.mediaSession.metadata = new MediaMetadata({
    title: song.name,
    album: song.category,
    artwork: [{src: song.imagePath, type: 'image/jpg'}]
  })

  navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('play', player.play)
  navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('pause', player.pause)
  navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('nexttrack', player.nextTrack)
  navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('previoustrack', player.prevTrack)
  // song and player are instances of state

Then you get those native media controls. Even stuff like "hey google, play/pause/skip"

I wish Android would let apps run with the screen off. The text to speech api kills itself after a few minutes, halfway through the blog post I'm having it read to me... It works if I keep the screen on but then I can't put it in my pocket and it drains the battery way faster

Browser or native doesn't matter, both have this issue. Heck, this is Google's own software that gets killed: the utility that submits the string to it is still there when I unlock the screen. It's probably just me but I really miss the Android 4 which I had customised to death so it would only run the things I wanted (no bloat): the battery still lasts weeks (the device is >10 years old!) if you don't ask it to do anything because nothing runs in the background. However, when I choose to run an app and don't turn it off before locking the screen, it'd just keep running

But yea, that wouldn't work for the general public

I have done this to videos on my iPhone using extensions called baking soda and vinegar. I then put the video into Picture in Picture mode, turn off the phone, turn it on, press the play button and turn it off again, with the audio still playing. It is not as convenient as the YouTube application, but I cannot copy and paste text from paused videos in the YouTube application or in YouTube comments either.

You sure can: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSessio...

The Video Background Play Fix extension for Firefox on Android comes close.

Ironfox/Firefox keeps playing audio when the screen is off and can pause/play from the lock screen and notification pulldown screen. I wrote a simple music player around the html audio tag.

iOS Safari does this, at least on bandcamp and SoundCloud.

I think it's more that people don't want others to see a pornhub icon when they are slowing holiday photos to friends and family. But they don't mind showing a Domino's app

I think people want to hide porn until they don't want to hide the porn, and they don't want visible reminders on their phone.

Are there porn apps? I believe App Store restrictions wouldn't allow that.

An app can’t be hidden easily, in a browser you just go incognito. Some people just don’t want others to know.

Do you have an iPhone? Safari for iOS deletes all cookies older than a week unless you add the site to your home screen.

Note that Safari will remove storage for a site if it hasn't been accessed in 7 days.

Yelp is one of the worst. So much so that I will do everything in my power to never download their app out of spite.

Why would you use their app if they are bostile towards you. That doesn't make any sense.

I tried to order McDonalds for pickup today. I got tired of twiddling with the website. I tried the app, disabled all the permissions.

Instead, McDonalds kept trying to pop up and demand my location, even after I put a zipcode and started my order. This repeats 3 times throughout my small order. Then I get to checkout and somehow I pop right back up to the map screen, where I am once again asked for location permissions. this was some 2 minutes into choosing a restaurant and picking my order.

I just uninstalled at that point and chose another eatery. Apps can get every bit as aggressive with permissions as they can with ads if their incentives really align with gaining them. That was a bizarre experience, but not the only one where I was badgered for permissions that the app really didn't need.

When “location” includes Bluetooth and wifi info, companies with a reason to invest can track your movement around a store to ~1m accuracy with BLE beacons etc. They know what you looked at in an aisle, for how long, and unless you paid in cash what you ended up buying via loyalty programs or credit card info. They also know, for each product you looked at and bought, or looked at and didn’t buy, what advertisements you were exposed to.

On an individual level who gives a shit, but with large enough datasets you can essentially A/B test your way to psychologically manipulating people into more sales.

‘Value’ and ‘how much and who would pay for the information’ are two different questions. It’s clear the answer to the latter is ‘alot’.

Victoria?

But agreed the push to apps sucks, I just assume in these cases it's so they can spam you with notifications about "new products" they're offering, like my bank likes to regularly offer me loans at terrible interest rates

> website forces you to trust your data to the website

Applies to apps too. The point was, you trust you whole disk to apps, in addition to this.

Facebook as well.

They responded to the criticism of people leaving their platform because the feed was all garbage and no friend updates by making a friends only feed feature you could only enable in the app.

You can install webapps "as an app" which solves that problem... its own icon in the dock, cmd-tabable, etc. In Chrome this is under the "Cast, save, share" menu.

Continue with firefox like an old (wise) person.

I don't think we need to. You appeal to regulators and they can manage it in lieu of the public. That's what the DMA is doing in the EU. Most initiatives happen from action of a relative minority interest.

"so they can orifice this services"

haha, that was a funny autocorrect (or diction) error, or maybe an even funnier Freudian slip!

For what it’s worth, iPhone shows a visible notification whenever the microphone is actively used. While you’re within an app, this will show as a small orange dot.

If an app attempts to use the microphone in the background, it’ll appear similarly to a phone call, but orange or red in colour.

One of those people might have googled about pottery, or did a casual Amazon search for indicative pricing, on their phone while on your Wi-Fi connection.